"Florence on your own" - please help!

[carlmm]

Like many others, I feel almost "pressured" to doing Florence and Pisa in one day.

 

Relax ;) What ever you do you will have a day full of art, history and beauty. As said previously I would recommend to choose one city. Either of them could fill more than a day. In either city you will have a wonderful day.

Choosing one city will take off a lot of pressure and stress on the day of your visit.

 

How do I convince myself to go with the safer option?

What do you consider the "safer" and accordingly the "unsafer" option?

The train has been taken by thousands of tourists and is a proven way to travel.

Taking the ship's bus might give you some more assurance of getting back on time once your are enroute back to the port but you should note that cruisers have previously reported about having been left because they missed the ship's bus.

Choose what you feel better with.

[hubofhockey]

Ugh. I'm so confused as to what to do. Like many others, I feel almost "pressured" to doing Florence and Pisa in one day. We have 13 hours in Livorno, so take off 1 hour on each end, and it's really 11 hours, providing all goes well (haha yeah i know).

 

I've really wanted to see the leaning tower, but have been told that pisa isn't worth it for the time, and to pick florence.

 

How do I convince myself to go with the safer option? I'm 1000000% nervous about making the ship back, because next stop is Barcelona. Not a quick jaunt lol.

 

I guess that you just have to consider the things that you are going to miss in Florence by taking the time to stop in Pisa. You may want to share a private roll call tour that covers both. We had a great day doing that. It was 135 euros per couple doing that plus cost of admission to the Leaning Tower and Accademy. But, on a tough train schedule, who needs to worry all day about tight train connections. You can probably find enough to do in Florence during the day to occupy your time. ;)

[Got2Cruise]

I guess that you just have to consider the things that you are going to miss in Florence by taking the time to stop in Pisa. You may want to share a private roll call tour that covers both. We had a great day doing that. It was 135 euros per couple doing that plus cost of admission to the Leaning Tower and Accademy. But, on a tough train schedule, who needs to worry all day about tight train connections. You can probably find enough to do in Florence during the day to occupy your time. ;)

 

We choose to do both. The decision was based the belief that the cruise was to give us a "taste" and then hopefully we will return to our favorites for an more in depth visit. We realized that this meant that the museums in Florence were out, this time. As first time visitors to Europe we were thrilled to have gone to both Pisa and Florence. And yes we used the ship's "on your own" excursion. Yes, we paid a lot, but coming from NY and using public transportation to commute, I didn't want to deal with that on my vacation. Everyone has their own priorities and you need to do what is best for YOU.:)